Source: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/2071-gravity-defying-3d-printing-robot-almost-makes-objects-appear-in-thin-air.html

Karl Lagerfeld recently opened a social media concept store in Amsterdam. I have admired his work and his inventive personality as long as I can remember. When I read about the store online, it was a given that I would check it out during my THNK week in the posh Location Hartenstraat No. 16. The store which is designed in a slick contemporary style offers ready-to-wear for men and women, handbags, eyewear, a range of unusual accessories and photo and design books handpicked by the maestro himself.  Of course it isn’t his fashion collection or the cool accessories that made me travel across town to snapshot the store. It was the eagerness to find out about his affinity to digital technology.

While I slipped into a cool black leather jacket in one of his high tech changing rooms, the renowned fashion icon had already pointed his camera in my direction. An iPad mounted on the cabin’s mirror offered me to pose in the Cabin and share the digital photos within my creative industries circles and on my Facebook, Twitter and email account. Not a bad PR tool for the retail concept of future-oriented urban hedonists.

Every shelf had an iPad mini attached, so you could flick through the collection pieces and even send an email to the master’s email address.

So, I got myself a little souvenir. An email from the store’s cabin and Karl, the doll.
Easy user Interfaces and cool design added to a pleasant experience throughout the store.

The staff, especially the store manager was extremely friendly and exhited to showing me around and explaining the tools.
Great store, go check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5y0j191H0kY

Setting a New World Record:

The 3D printer uses a liquid resin, which is hardened at precisely the correct spots by a focused laser beam. The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a polymerized line of solid polymer, just a few hundred nanometers wide. This high resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand. “Until now, this technique used to be quite slow”, says Professor Jürgen Stampfl from the Institute of Materials Science and Technology at the TU Vienna. “The printing speed used to be measured in millimeters per second – our device can do five meters in one second.” In two-photon lithography, this is a world record. The 3d printer could also be used to create tailor made construction parts for biomedical technology or nanotechnology.

Vienna’s famous landmark, St. Stephansdome, 137m tall was ‘printed’ with a two-photon lithography technology in the size of the width of one single human hair and can only be discovered under a microscope.

Hollywood – welcome to Vienna!

(Photo credit: Klaus Cicha)

Further Information:

Jan Torgersen Additive Manufacturing Technologies Vienna University of Technology T.: +43-1-58801-30869 jan.torgersen@tuwien.ac.at

But THIS …

…is just MAGNIFICENT.

It’s a painted house facade on 29th street in Manhattan. I saw it on facebook a few days ago…

…and liked it so much, I had to see how the finished piece looks. Surprisingly, there was only one photo posted on the web, so I asked my friend Cameron to grab his camera and drive across town to send his impressions across the ocean. It’s still not finished but even seeing the process is amazing. Applause to the marketing team who is funding this idea. No – hold on, let’s make this real. I rise from my chair and give them standing ovations.

There will be participants from all corners of the globe including Tanzania, USA, the Netherlands, India, Sweden, China, Cameroon, France, South Africa, Canada, Italy, Singapore, Colombia and me representing Austria. Smile. The fact that there are no lectures but workshops and dialogues with thought leaders from leading universities and companies is truly thrilling.

I’ll be reporting from Amsterdam as of next week – if you’re interested, stay tuned.

Photographs by Frederik Vercruysse and Wouter Van Vaerenbergh

Inspiration for places that lack infrastructure. www.muvbox.ca

Over the last decade, Gibson has moved from spray-painting to stencilled street art, his images ranging from bird nests to prehistoric fish and flowers: